In Toronto in 1917, the Y.M.C.A. opened a recreational club specifically for First World War soldiers: The Red Triangle Club.
Tag: 1919 Page 1 of 3
The Star Weekly ran a series in 1919 called “Real Stories of the War, As Told by Returned Soldiers” where prizes were awarded. Jim illustrated some of these. The first one here was about the capture of a Prussian Brass Band, which won $1.
This story was about capturing Germans while gathering food, which also won $1. ($1 in 1919 would be $17 in 2025).
By Gregory Clark , November 15, 1919.
Of the false joys of deer hunting, several hundred Toronto men are by this time wholly aware.
As far as one can make out, deer hunters are like drink addicts or dope fiends. After each hunting trip, they swear off. Never again for them. Nevermore will they desert the comforts of a large city for two November weeks spent amid slush, sleet, and vast uncultivated areas of fallen timber and prickly underbrush.
But when the first hint of sleet is in the air, the confirmed deer hunter seizes his rifle, some old clothes and a dunnage bag, and jumps the first train north.
To-day and for the next few days, however, they are returning with the “never again” expression on their faces, tired, starved, weak and unshaven. However, they try to disguise their real feelings, they are as fed-up as troops coming out of the line after a twenty-one day tour.
Jimmy and I know, for we have just returned from our first hunting trip.
Back in September, egged on by the boasting of certain confirmed deer hunters around the office, we started to make plans. We invited half a dozen others to join our party, and all these gave a delighted acceptance. But on the eve of November fifth, the opening of the deer season, to our astonishment, they all advised us in regretful accents, of their inability to come with us. It isn’t our astonishment now.
Alone and full of high hopes, Jimmy and I set off for our summer cottage for the hunt.
Passing over as immaterial our arrival at a Georgian Bay town, our wrestling with dunnage bags, rifles, and those odd articles of baggage that always seem to get themselves carried at the last moment, our early rising in a frost-bitten hotel and our journey by gasoline launch (at twelve dollars1), over the Arctic expanses of the lower Georgian Bay, we arrived about noon, at our summer cottage. Gone were all the balmy green trees, the warm rocks, the soft blue waters. Our summer cottage was a draughty, bleak little building standing forth naked amid a few bare trees, with frost on its roof. There was ice along the beach where, four short months ago, I was wont to paddle my feet.
After a short inspection of the inside of the cottage, inhospitably packed up for the winter, we decided to shift a couple of camp stretchers into the kitchen and there to cook, eat, live and sleep.
We carried a half-ton rowboat out of the dining room to the water and rowed down to the farm of a French family, about a mile away, to arrange about going after deer. After due consideration, the French family agreed to quit work on the stone foundations of a new house and come hunting with us.
Jimmy and I had vague notions that in hunting deer, we walked through a pleasant autumn forest, with hounds stepping gracefully in front of us, ever and anon scaring up startled deer, which ran in terror from us like young cows, while we stood back and fired carefully aimed shots after them, killing them in their tracks.
What deer hunting really is comes as follows:
Three hours before dawn, the kitchen fire having been out some hours, the frigid breezes blowing through the cracks of the cottage wake us from our fitful slumber. We rise in very grumpy spirits, put on a fire, sit disconsolately around while we prepare a breakfast of canned beans, brittle bacon and tea. Then we array ourselves for action, go down to the rowboat and crack the ice in the bottom of it and row, on chilly seats, down to our guides just as dawn pales the east.
At our guides’ they remove our dashing khaki hunting coats and give us old blue coats several sizes too large.
“No good being mistook for a fawn,” we are told.
Then we commence to walk. Up hill down dale, over rocks, through swamps and impenetrable forests we go. And although it is a bitter November day, with sleet biting us, we perspire richly.
After tramping for an hour and a half, till our fine new hunting boots are scraping the flesh off our heels, we are halted on a high, open stretch of rock, where the wind howls in freedom, and the fine sleet spins and eddies past us. We are told to stand very still and watch up this stretch of rock. Jimmy is placed across a gully on a similar ridge
The hound has meanwhile been taken in a long detour away off in the distance.
We stand in a position of readiness, our rifle at the alert. The perspiration soon freezes to our skin. Our fingers grasping the metal of the rifle grows numb and senseless. Our feet feel like blocks of ice. But we Keep a stern eye up the ridge.
Quarter hours pass that seem like hours. An hour passes that seems like a day. We commence to shiver quite violently, and stamp our feet on the rocks, while our attention wavers.
Suddenly, far in the distance, we hear the baying of a hound.
Our shivering turns to a regular shaking. It is uncontrollable. Our hands seem like feet. We make a pitiful attempt to come into a position of readiness. The hounds’ barking grows, nearer and nearer.
Then, with no sound and with no movement of the bushes a greyish brown form trimmed with white appears ahead of us.
It moves like a wind-blown leaf. It does not seem to touch the ground. Nothing on earth moves so swiftly or so gracefully or so silently.
Like a streak of lightning it passes us within twenty-five feet, a great white tail waving bravely.
The howling dog appearing at the far end of the ridge wakes us from our trance. A fine big buck has passed!
We are still shivering violently and in a mental daze when our guide dashes up out of the underbrush and yells–
“Why didn’t you shoot! Why didn’t you shoot!”
“Shoot what?” you ask weakly.
“That deer! It went within a few feet of you!”
“Shoot that!” you cry indignantly. “Say, what do you think. I am? An aviator?”
Well, after four or five repetitions of this tramping through wildernesses designed for mountain goats and cringing on bleak Alaskan plateaux till our bodies feel about to fall to pieces and a warm fireside seems the furthest thing in the universe; and after four or five deer have gone past us or over us before our feeble minds could grasp their presence, we finally control our mechanism sufficiently to pull the trigger viciously just at that furious moment the great, soaring buck sails past. And by some miracle, he leaps fair in front of your bullet and crumples pitifully and tragically into a slim little brown heap on the ground.
A live deer is a big, splendid, graceful, beautiful creature. A dead deer is as pitiful a little thing as a dead rabbit.
But when you tie his four knees together and lift him up on a pole to carry him two miles to the nearest water, he is neither little nor pitiful. He weighs over two hundred pounds. He sways and swings on the pole as you walk. The first fifty yards is the dickens. The second fifty yards is an inferno. After that you lose consciousness of all human feelings and just struggle along. Where the rocks and bush were rough before, they are mountainous when carrying out your deer. Where there were open spaces to pick your way before, these all magically close up into jumbled ravines and frozen wet swamps, as if in protest against the killing of a king of the forest.
Scarce remembering our names or standing, we at last reach the river and a motorboat. In it we sit and freeze on the journey back to the summer cottage. How warmly we pictured this return with the venison! How cold the actual performance left us!
Ah, well, it may have cost us something in pride to find what deer shooting was. But we didn’t do as badly as the three American hunters, who came up to these parts to shoot moose. No silly little deer for them! Moose or nothing. And hardly had they entered the bush when they saw three large dark brown animals on the shore of a lake. With deadly aim, all three hunters fired, and killed our French settler’s three horses. To avoid aspersions on their reputations as hunters rather than to account for the damage to the Frenchman’s property, these three New Yorkers paid five hundred dollars each2.
As for Jimmie and I, we will go deer hunting never again.
But when we do, we are going to take valets along to carry fur lined garments for us; and a larger party, to help bring in the meat.
Editor’s Notes:
September Morn is a painting by Paul Chabas from 1912. It caused a sensation at the time because of the nudity, and was parodied for years afterwards, including by Jim above.
A Farmerette was a nickname given to women who volunteered their labour to farms during World War One as a part of the Farm Service Corps.
By Gregory Clark, December 6, 1919.
Discovery of British Scientists Is Confirmed by Toronto Observers of Returned Men.
May be Due to Bite of Mad Cootie
At Any Rate, It Is Contagious – Violent Outbreaks Followed by Elation.
British scientists have just discovered a new disease arising out of the war. It ranks with trench-feet. scabies, shell-shock, impetigo, profiteerosis, “p.u.o”, pes frigidus, “wind-up,” boils and cooties as medical discoveries of the war; subjects on which there was some little information prior to 1914, but which were really discovered, in the true sense of the word, only during the war, when medical science had for the first time a large body of men entirely at its mercy. The new disease is called Fellophobia, and means “hatred of one’s fellow men.”
British medical men define fellophobia as akin to hydrophobia which is caused by the bite of mad dog. Certain branches of the profession are trying to trace the new disease to the bite of a mad cootie while others are attempting to lay the blame on rats; and yet others on the biting remarks of mad company sergeant-majors.
Fellophobia is found among returned soldiers in varying degrees of malevolence. The reports from England cite the following cases.
A young man, formerly of very amiable disposition, who rose to the rank of sergeant in the war, has come home a changed man, with frequent periods of his old good humor, but with regular outbreaks of a very violent nature over the most trivial incidents, during which he shouts in an alarming manner, stamps his feet, and stands in corners, muttering unintelligible things to himself. This sad transformation is credited to the dread germ of fellophobia.
Violent Outbreaks
Another man, formerly a stock broker, clubman, and general good sport, enlisted cheerfully as a captain, and served for four years as an R.T.O., that is, Railway Transport Officer. On returning to civil life, he is a changed man. He is a cynic, a pessimist, and a crank. He, too, is given to those violent outbreaks, in which he shouts and roars, and orders everyone about, including his own family, in a most arbitrary manner. The doctors are at a loss to account for this patient’s trouble as he was never exposed to the dangers of lice, rats or sergeant-majors, he having been stationed throughout the war at Boulogne. From this case, it is suspected that fellophobia is contagious.
Has fellophobia raised its sinister head in Toronto yet?
While Colonel McVicker and other local military medical men have not yet encountered the disease by that name, symptoms that bear a suspicious resemblance to it have been observed.
Dr. A. H. Abbott, secretary of the Citizens’ Repatriation League, while stating as his opinion that the war has sweetened and broadened with humor the tempers of soldiers as a whole says that he has met individuals suffering from something very like fellophobia. An Irish soldier came repeatedly to the Citizens’ Repatriation League to demand a loan of money for a sick wife. Now, matter of fact, the officials of the League knew that this man’s wife not only was not sick but that, being separated from her husband, she was never better in her life. The officials therefore consistently refused the money. One day, without any warning this Irishman developed violent symptoms and struck one of Dr. Abbott’s assistants a fierce blow on the ear.
Major F. N. Kippen, D.S.O., M.C. of the Government Employment Bureau for professional and technical returned men, says he has encountered considerable numbers of men undoubtedly suffering from the new disease.
“The disease,” said he, “seems to be aggravated when the sufferer meets former adjutant or sergeant-major in civilian clothes. The germs seem to be deeply affected by these two types and create a fever in the victim. He glares at the former adjutant or sergeant-major, the fellophobia often causing him to abuse them in a most shocking manner.”
Followed by Elation
Mr. Arthur J. Monk, also of the Employment Bureau, adds to Major Kippen’s observations the following:
“Yes, but the outbreak of violence on meeting a former adjutant or sergeant-major is immediately followed by a period of great elation, amounting almost to hysteria. The patient seems seized with a paroxysm of delight. He smiles as if to split his face, and immediately rushes around in search of his friends. It is just as if he had got a weight off his chest.”
Another prominent military man expresses the alarming opinion that practically all soldiers are affected to some extent by fellophobia.
“I know five Colonels in Toronto for example,” says this gentleman. “During the war, while undoubtedly showing symptoms of some kind towards their subordinates, these Colonels were most devoted admirers of their Brigadiers and Divisional Commanders. Nothing pleased them more than to be invited to tea with the Brigadier or to be seen riding with him in the rear areas. And the opportunity of even a moment’s chat with the Divisional Commander was enough to put these Colonels in a good humor for a week.
“But, now, how different! On the slightest provocation and often without excuse, these Colonels will go into a frenzy over their Brigadiers and Divisional Commanders. They call their Brigadier a dud and their General an unmitigated fat-head. They swear the Brigadier couldn’t have held his job but for his battalion commanders. And as for the G.O.C., he was just a plain ass, kept in position by pull.”
True of All Ranks
“This,” says our military man, “is true of all ranks. Majors curse their colonels, captains their majors and lieutenants their captains, except in rare instances. And the rank and file curse the whole tribe of officer.
“If it is fellophobia, then the medical profession should lend every effort to isolating this terrible germ before it embitters our whole life.”
It is feared that fellophobia, being contagious, has already affected a number of men who have not been in the army at all. The manager of a well-known manufactory in Toronto is given to spasms of the disease whenever he sees an ex-soldier. The moment a returned man in search of work puts his nose in at this manager’s door, the manager is overcome by a peculiar sort of rage, and he leaps to his feet, shouting:
“No! No! To h— with returned soldiers!”
It is believed that this man contracted the disease from some of the many returned soldiers who have applied to him for work.
Other civilians closely affiliated with soldiers, such as the young men and women stenographers employed by the D.S.C.R., seem quite as susceptible to fellophobia as soldiers themselves. Simple questions, such as: “At what time does the director come in from lunch?” cause these originally genial and gentle people to fly into uncontrollable pets.
Personally, I am of the opinion that the cootie to responsible for fellophobia. To It has been traced trench fever, “p.u.o.”; impetigo, scabies and dugout-insomnia.
If the medical profession is interested, I may say that I have discovered an old comrade-in-arms who has brought back with him a very fine colony of these insects in good condition for scientific purposes.
Editor’s Note: Some of the real diseases mentioned that affected soldiers in World War One are “puo” (Pyrexia of Unknown Origin), Impetigo (a skin rash) and dugout insomnia (a general insomnia no doubt from the fear of being attacked).
